Mai Taji [name at birth Taj Din] was born in 1941 to a Punjabi-speaking family at Daleri town in Amritsar District, Punjab. Their father Muaaz Din was a farmer, and their mother Fazal Bibi was a homemaker. Taji is the youngest of two brothers and four sisters, and grew up at Amritsar before Partition. Sharing their earliest recollections of childhood, Taji says that the agrarian families in their town were engaged in the barter trade where wheat and rice were exchanged amongst them quite often.
The family diet was vegetarian, and brassware was used for cooking and consumption. They used to play the game of Kokla Chapaki with friends in the mohallah from all faiths quite often. The clothing worn at home was plain khaddar, stitched by their mother and sisters at home.
Taji says they must have been six or seven years old when they had to leave their homes at Daleri. “There was an announcement in our area. We were told that anyone who wants to leave for Pakistan should do it now or living conditions could get worse in Amritsar,” They recounts.
Taji says that their family moved to Lahore via the Wagah Park immediately after that announcement. “It was two months before riots broke out in Amritsar and everywhere else,” They says. Taji did not witness any violence and killings himself but recalls hearing stories from elders about what was happening. From Lahore, Taji’s family went to Kana village in Kasur where they settled permanently. Neither Taji nor their siblings obtained any formal schooling, and Taji’s elder brothers became daily wage workers to support the family. Taji’s father died eight years after Partition. After reaching teens, Taji switched to silk wear for attending special occasions like village festivals, melas and weddings.
During the same time, Taji met their first guru. “I found him while buying vegetables at a market near the Kot Lakhpat railway stop. His name was Safdar. He was veterinarian doctor specializing in livestock and cattle, and an army officer. He hired me as his assistant and taught me how to prepare injections for the animals,” Taji says. After spending some years at their clinic, Taji started work at a tandoor where they kneaded dough for rotis, for two decades. They quit the job after developing a form of vision impairment, and have been at their parents’ home in Kasur ever since. They have many followers from the khwaja sira community in Lahore. Taji depends on them for their daily living expenses nowadays. Their mother passed away in the early 1970s. Taji continues to live at their parents’ home in Kani, Kasur, and reverted to male clothing in the late 90s.
Taji believes that the generation today is suffering from a culture of individualized lifestyles. “The isolation and the restlessness we have comes from that culture. We need to bring back the days when it was considered normal for people in one mohallah to get together in one place and share their happiness and sorrows like a joint family system.”
On nostalgia concerning their childhood at Amritsar, they say: “There is nothing compared to memories of one’s birthplace, the home one grows up in, and friends from the mohallah one used to play with. No one wants to be forced out of their houses all of sudden. The pain of losing home is unbearable, especially when we really had no choice in the matter. It makes me very sad to think of our lost childhood, even today.”

Muhammad Saleem was born in Gurdaspur. His father, Sufi Abdul Aziz had a business of construction materials in the city but they lived in a village of Gurdaspur. They were well off in India. His mother’s name was Rehmat Bibi. Mr. Saleem believes that he was 8 to 9 years old when Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place and he was a witness to it. He was in Jallianwala Bagh with his father when the shooting started. Mr. Saleem and his father hid inside stairs near which they were sitting. They stayed there all night. Next day, his elder brother who was in army came to get them.
In Gurdaspur, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lived together but there used to be a lot of conflicts on festivals like Holi. Mr. Saleem also discussed different Hindu festivals and killings of people. His area was called Abdullah Pur as it was a Muslim majority area. Now the name has been changed and Sikhs live in that area as he discovered on his tour to India after Partition. He visited India twice and stayed with the Sikh family in Koocha Pundit, Delhi which had saved their lives during Partition. This Sikh family was a friend of his grandfather and so they helped them reach River Beas safely. They called the father of that family Bapu which was used for all the elders in India.
On his way to Pakistan, Mr. Saleem has seen a lot of bloodshed and looting which is a painful memory. He is still homeless in Pakistan and adores the freedom that Pakistan has for Muslims.

Muhammad Yousuf was born to Mian Imamdeen and Noor Bibi in 1941 in Kotkapura, Faridkot. Mian Imamdeen was a farmer. He owned land. At the time, Muhammad Yousuf had only one younger brother.
He used to go to a madrassa for religious studies. They learned the basic prayers and how to offer the Salah. After that he and his friends would run after wheels that had been taken out of cycles. To make the wheels go faster they would be hit with sticks.
The city was a Muslim majority city. Friday prayers were held in the mosque and Eid prayers would be held in the Eid-gah.
His memories of the Partition start with hearing of violence. When this started people from the surrounding villages came to the city seeking safety. The population of Kotkapura suddenly grew. He recalls that at this time police were doing regular raids in the neighbourhood and confiscating anything that could be considered a weapon.
He shares that the Raja of Faridkot wanted his people to make it to Pakistan safely. Some from the Sikh community forced him to choose one city between Faridkot or Kotkapura to save. He chose Faridkot. Faridkot was emptied and its people reached Pakistan without any problem. The kafla that left Kotkapura was 20 miles or so in length. They encountered no attackers on the first day. On the second day, Muhammad Yousuf remembers seeing people hiding in the fields. He asked his father why they were there and his father told him that they were harmless onlookers. An hour or two later there was an explosion and a lot of people died. The people hiding in the fields also attacked the kafla. The kafla was divided in two with Muhammad Yousuf and his family in the front half. They escaped.
A girl that his mother knew came running to them. She told them that the attackers had killed everyone (her family). Muhammad Yousuf remembers looking back and seeing the attacking mob cutting down people.
The kafla rested that night next to a large body of water. There was blood in it, shares Muhammad Yousuf. They were attacked that night as well. The kafla was there for three days and it rained all the time. Those that drank that water got sick with cholera.
The third day military from Pakistan came. They announced that the original plan of crossing over from Head Sulaiman was no longer possible and they would be crossing from Head Ganda Singh. This meant going back from the way they had come. The sick and elderly were loaded into trucks and brought to Kasur. The rest walked to Kotkapura. They stayed one night there.
He shares that they had left behind a buffalo with their neighbors in Kotkapura. Muhammad Yousuf’s father went to pay them a visit. The buffalo had not given milk since they had left. Imamdeen milked her and gave it to the neighbors.
The next day the left the village. At the Indian side of Ganda Sigh, they stayed the night. They were fed cooked wheat by the locals. It was poisoned and a lot of people died. He also speaks of corpses piled as high as houses on the side of the road. Muhammad Yousuf shares every time he goes to a funeral, he sees the mountains of the dead and thinks of how lucky the deceased is. He has a hundred or so people praying for him and is buried respectably. No one had held any funeral services for the dead he had seen, no one had buried them. They had been tossed into piles.
They crossed over to Pakistan at Head Ganda Singh. Rain and cholera killed more people there. The four of them lived in a tent. A few days later a train came. It took everyone directly to Lala Musa. They came then to Gujrat. The government announced that there was no space in the city. New arrivals would be accommodated in the villages and given houses and land.
Muhammad Yousuf and his family walked to Jalalpur Jatta. From there they rode donkeys to Tandamota near Kashmir. Whichever house you liked you would point to it and the officials would break the locks for you.
The family lived for a month or so in Tandamota. Then a war broke out in Kashmir. Dying and mutilated people escaping the carnage started pouring into Tandamota. Muhammad Yousuf shares that he and others were afraid of what might come next. They had barely escaped from India and now they would be caught up in a new conflict. The police wouldn’t let them leave because if everyone left, the city would be become abandoned. The family left it secretly at night. They had no baggage. They first came to Jalalpur and then to Gujrat. From there they took a train to Lahore. From there they came to Dunga Bunga. He joined school and did his matriculation from here.
They were allotted part of their land in 1958. The rest of the land Muhammad Yousuf had to go to great lengths to get. He had to deal with red tape and bribery for years. He received the land in late 1960s. He shares that his father, till his dying breath, believed that they would return one day to Kotkapura. He never tried to claim the land they had left behind.
He married in 1958 or 1959 to his cousin. He has eight sons and two daughters. He has never been to India. He believes that there is no point in going back. He believes that it is good that they came to Pakistan where they are free to follow Islam.

Salima Hashmi [name at birth Salima Sultana] was born on 14th December 1942 to an Anglo-Indian family in Delhi. Her father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was an army officer, poet, political activist, editor of the Pakistan Times, and founding editor of the Daily Amroze. Her mother, Alys Faiz, was a political activist, writer and homemaker.
Narrating the story of her name, Mrs Hashmi says: “The surname is a very Western idea. In our family, we had the tradition of giving a complete name, a first name followed by the second name. My mother liked Rehana, and Sabiha for the first name but my father didn’t approve. He named me after Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, his friend who was a scientist and also an artist. Hence I was named Salima with Sultana as my second name, and my sister was named Moneeza Gul,” she says. Mrs Hashmi dropped her second name, after the expiry of her second passport.
Her father’s family was from Kala Qadar, a village in Sialkot. Her mother’s maternal family was from France, and paternal family is from London, England. Sharing a family lore about her paternal grandfather, Mrs Hashmi says that after a chance encounter with an Afghan trader in Lahore, he rose to prominence from being a peasant of Kala Qadar, to an educated, well-respected and envied treasurer of financial affairs at the Court of the King Shah Abdur Rehman the II, in Kabul, Afghanistan. “There were many controversies and conspiracies cooking up against him. There was an Englishwoman, a doctor, who was in charge of the women of the king’s harem and introducing the small pox vaccine. Rumor has it that she was in love with my grandfather and when she heard about the controversies and conspiracies against him at the harem, she informed him immediately, and he fled to India. Later on, he went on to England to study law at Cambridge. During this time, the Afghan King sent him a proposal to take up ambassadorship of the Afghan government at Queen Victoria’s court in England, which he accepted.
One of the women her grandfather married was a princess of the Hazara tribe. “The novel Vizier’s Daughter by Lillias Hamilton is actually based on the life and character of my grandfather. After completing his studies, he returned to Sialkot and started his law practice. He was a close friend of the poet Muhammad Iqbal,” she says. “My grandmother was the only Punjabi woman my grandfather had married. She hailed from a village in Sialkot, near Kala Qadar. The rest of his wives were Afghans.”
Mrs Hashmi says that her mother’s maternal family had settled in England during the 17th century. Her great grandfather used to own a posh bookshop on Swallow Street near Piccadilly. “The Prince of Wales used to sit there, and buy books from him. After the economic depression of World War I, they moved and settled in East London, where they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. During that time, my mother joined the Communist Party and became involved in the Freedom Movement for India.”
She left London for Amritsar in 1938 where husband of her elder sister M. D. Taseer was posted Principal of the M.A.O. College in Amritsar. “My father was an English teacher at that College,” She says. Mrs Hashmi’s parents were married in 1941.
Before Partition, Mrs Hashmi and her younger sister Moneeza [born in Simla] were raised in Delhi, Rawalpindi, Quetta, Simla, Lahore and Srinagar as a result of their father’s various postings in the army.
Sharing her earliest memories from childhood, Mrs Hashmi says she was two years old when she was with her family in Rawalpindi. “I remember that because I fell and had hurt my head. I was taken into a hospital and given stitches. It was a military hospital. Parents weren’t allowed to stay with the patient but the maids were. My mother asked my paternal aunt to pretend to be a maid, and then she was allowed to tend to me for the night at the hospital. I almost died of blood poisoning because of that injury. In those days, Penicillin was newly invented. My father being in the army had some privileges, so I was given Penicillin and survived.”
Mrs Hashmi’s first spoken language at home is Urdu. “My parents had decided that their child should grow up on one language and that would be Urdu. My mother had learnt Urdu, and she taught me to read and write at our home in Delhi. When my English grandparents visited us in 1947, I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. It was at the age of four and a half years, I started learning my grandparents’ native language. My grandmother was fun. She used to tell us stories, and would act for us. She came fully prepared with puppets and things to entertain the children,” she recounts.
In early 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at a nursery school in Lahore. “I remember my mother telling me it was a Hindu school. Of course I never knew what that meant at the time. I remember going in and playing there. I used to weep copiously every morning when I was sent to school and that continued for most of my life,” she says.
Describing herself as an introvert and quiet person, Mrs Hashmi’s closest friends from childhood were her cousins Mariam, Salma, and Billu [the late Salman Taseer].
At the time of Partition, Mrs Hashmi, her mother, sister, grandparents, maternal aunt and uncle were in Srinagar. “My father, a Lieutenant Colonel in rank, had resigned from the army in February of 1947 and moved to Lahore to set up the Pakistan Times and Amroze newspaper offices. My grandparents had just arrived from London so we had decided to spend the summer in Srinagar. We celebrated Eid there and afterwards, our father sent us a message from Lahore to leave Srinagar immediately as the situation was getting worse,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
They took a bus from Srinagar to Murree. On the way to Murree, Mrs Hashmi says she saw a bus at Thrait that was full of Sikhs who had been massacred. After reaching Murree, her mother organized the women in a procession to stop the rioting and bloodshed. “I remember she sat me down on a donkey and handed me a white flag. I was the leader of the procession waving my white flag. I was scared of the donkey but at the same time felt proud to be leading a rally of women. There was a certain performance to the role and I really enjoyed it,” she says.
After a day or two in Murree, Mrs Hashmi and her family continued on to the Rawalpindi Railway Station on the bus, and took the train to Lahore. They shared the compartment with another English woman, the artist Anna Molka Ahmed [who founded and headed the department of fine arts at Punjab University] with her daughter.
“There were so many people on the roof of the train. They were from Rawalpindi trying to crossover to India. There was mayhem and crowds, and there was no light in the train compartment,” Mrs Hashmi recounts. “We arrived at the Lahore station, which was under curfew at the time. There was a terrible hush in the city. My father had a curfew pass, so we managed to leave the Station and stayed with Begum Shah Nawaz at Lawrence Road for a while and in the meantime my parents started looking for a place to stay,” she says. They found a grand house not too far on Lawrence Road which is now a Government Office Building. Sharing her memories of her mother’s reactions on visiting that house, Mrs Hashmi says: “The lawn was completely dug out. The house was in bad shape, ruined by the miscreants. The electrical sockets had been pulled out, fans were taken off. There was a prayer room in the house that was defaced and badly desecrated. I remember picking up a children’s comic book from the rubble and my mother snatched it from my hand and threw it down yelling at me: we are not to touch anything here,”
Mrs Hashmi and her family settled in an undamaged upper portion of a well-known doctor’s house on Empress Road and began rebuilding their lives. Recalling sights from the damaged lower portion of the house Mrs Hashmi says that she saw a refrigerator slashed by an axe. Her paternal grandmother had migrated to Gujranwala from Gurdaspur barely escaping the violence, and was eventually allotted residential property in Lahore against the lands she owned in Gurdaspur.
In late 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at the Convent of Jesus & Mary where she wasn’t allowed to speak Urdu because everyone at the Convent was encouraged to speak English. “The nuns were aghast that I was an Englishwoman’s daughter but didn’t know any English. They refused to let me speak in Urdu and I used to weep and would sit at the edge of the door waiting for school to end. My grandparents used to pick me up in a tonga. I used to rush at the sight of them, I hated that school so much.” She says. 104/2, U B;pvk Ph 2, Street 3,
At home, Mrs Hashmi says that daal chawal had always been her favorite dish cooked by her mother, and mangoes are the love of her life. “She also used to make Irish stew and Shepherd’s pie that I loved. Her specialty was homemade ice-cream, which she made using an icebox when we didn’t have a refrigerator. My mother was always particular about hygiene. I remember she used potassium permanganate to wash the dishes and the clothes to keep epidemic diseases like cholera and dysentery at bay. She was very particular and strict about table manners. That was her Englishness that used to persevere. We always had napkins on the table.” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
In 1948, she was enrolled at the Queen Mary Convent where she studied for three years then moved on to the Kinnaird High School in Lahore from where she completed her matriculation. Despite her inclination towards the arts, Mrs Hashmi derived inspiration from the sciences, particularly Physics.
In 1951, Mrs Hashmi’s father was incarcerated by the Pakistan government. Recalling an incident of her final year at Queen Mary’s, Mrs Hashmi says that she was invited by one of her school fellows to her birthday party. “I hated going to parties but since I had become reclusive after my father’s arrest and no news on his whereabouts, my mother insisted that I should go. I was eight years old at the time. There were some men sitting on the table at the party who started asking me questions about my father’s whereabouts which turned into a kind of interrogation. I started putting on a bravado act despite not having heard from him in three months. I told them my mother has just received a letter from him. I knew I was doing the wrong thing but I was so scared at the way they were interrogating me I told them what they wanted to hear. My mother found out about the incident. She called my school fellow’s family and gave them hell for it. I still remember the way she yelled on the phone,”
In 1956, she opted to study at the Lahore College for Women for her intermediate degree in fine arts and in 1962, she completed her intermediate certification course on design from the National College of Arts in Lahore. In the same year, she travelled to London and studied for a three-year diploma in art education at the Bath Academy of Art in Bristol majoring in photography and painting. In 1990, she completed her MA honors in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.
In mid-1965 Salima was married to playwright, writer and artist Shoaib Hashmi whom she’d met on several occasions in Lahore and London, due to their overlapping interests in the performance arts. Sharing the tale of her marriage, Mrs Hashmi says. “Our marriage took place after my grandmother’s approval. She had no idea that Shoaib and I already knew each other. She looked at him once and said that he is a nice boy and I should definitely marry him.”
The marriage took place in Karachi were Mrs Hashmi’s parents were living at the time. Mrs Hashmi moved to Model Town in Lahore with her husband after marriage, and lives there today with her immediate family. The couple has one son, Yasser Hashmi and a daughter, Mira Hashmi.
Soon after their marriage the 1965 war had broken out, and Lahore was under curfew once again. “The whole of Gulberg was empty. Most people had run for their lives but we stayed behind. Shoaib used to have a curfew pass. He was doing a program called Parakh, and I was doing a puppet show called Babloo aur Naazi for PTV. During the war, we used to go and do those, and I still enjoy doing that.” she says. “We used to walk around in the darkness with the curfews going on and the noise of sirens. It was a short war but a lot of people died because of it. During this time my father wrote the poem called Blackout.”
In 1966, Mrs Hashmi returned to London where she joined an infant school and invested most of her time on art education for children. In the meantime, her husband took up his studies at the London School of Economics. The couple stayed there for three years. In 1969, Mrs Hashmi took up teaching Fine Arts at the National College of Arts in Lahore whilst continuing to build her team of artists for television shows Mr and Mrs Hashmi were producing together. She also served as the Principal of National College of Arts for four years. She’s organized, curated and implemented several art exhibits and design projects, conferences and seminars in Pakistan and around the world. She also has several publications to her credit.
In 1981, Mrs Hashmi’s husband was arrested and jailed at Kot Lakhpat with 400 people for their progressive views. “It was déjà vu for me at many levels. My daughter was the same age I was when my father had been arrested and the superintendent of the Kot Lakhpat jail where my husband was, was the same jailer during my father’s tenure in prison,” she says.
In 1955, Mrs Hashmi visited her birthplace Delhi with her father during the Asia Writers’ Congress organized by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Her father was the head of the Pakistani delegation. “I remember we went across Wagah on foot and then went on to Amritsar by train where we had lunch. We arrived in Delhi and met with friends from pre-Partition days. I also remember meeting Nehru,” she says.
In 1962, Mrs Hashmi revisited Delhi with her mother to watch celebrations of the India Republic Day. “It used to be celebrated with royalty and pomp, with elephant processions and fairs during Nehru’s time,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, she says: “There is no closure because people’s stories have yet to be properly documented and understood. They were the ones who had to pay the price for a decision in which so much was left to chance, and neither side envisaged what they were unleashing. It was a terrible carnage which was totally unnecessary. The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the 3rd and 4th generation today who don’t have those immediate memories but they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.
There are a million ways to look at Partition. Over the years I have heard stories of bitterness, of great optimism, of loyalty and of gratitude. As a child, I’ve heard stories from my parents who witnessed it. My mother worked in the refugee camps. I was at the Lahore Railway Station when a train full of dead bodies had arrived and my mother had yelled at our driver to take me away from that carnage. There was a deathly silence on the platform in Lahore which I understood years later.
My father, even though he was from this side, could not reconcile all his life with the biggest bloodbath in the history of this region. It is evident in the fact that he managed to write only one poem on Partition. It’s these stories that lead us to know why it happened the way it happened.
The fact remains that the British set this up to drive the point home. This was their last good bye to the Sub-Continent. It could’ve been nipped in the bud very easily but they chose to look away when they had the means not to. I feel we really have to accept that there was this separation and we need to come to terms with it if we want to move forward. Otherwise, we are only going to trivialize all the carnage that has happened and it will weigh on our shoulders if we don’t find a way to cope with it.

Arghwani Begum was born on 2nd January, 1922 at the Princely State of Sahaspur in Uttar Pradesh. Her mother, Ms Ghafoorunisa was a purdah-observing home-maker. Her father, Mr Samiullah Khan was a Governor of the Princely State of Sahaspur with 22 villages in the Bijnor district under his possession and supervision. Residents of the villages were mainly Muslim, Hindu and Christian families and most of them were farmers, she recalls. “Seasonal crops were grown in the villages with mainly rice, sugarcane, pulses and sesame from what I’ve seen. A portion of the harvest would come to my father. That was our family’s main source of income,” she says. The irrigation system for the lands at Sahaspur was well-based. Each village in Sahaspur had its own well.
She grew up with three sisters at their haveli (mansion) in Sahaspur. Arghwami Begum is the youngest. Electricity came to Sahaspur in 1934, when Arghwani Begum was 10 years old. “Before electricity arrived in our area, we used to have oil-powered fans,” she recalls.
Their haveli was segregated into mardana (male) and zanana (female) sections including the living rooms, dining areas and the kitchens, she recalls. “Men and women living in the house were not allowed to trespass into each other’s sections,” she says. The same rules applied to the servants and the maids, she says. There was a separate building for guests within the haveli and stables for the elephants and the horses as well, and a garage for cars. Food used to be made by the cooks. “We used to have both male and female cooks assigned to the dining areas. The men used to eat outside mainly, while the women ate inside,” she recalls. Copper pans and utensils were mainly used for cooking. “On the first or second of every month, they’d be electroplated,” Arghwani Begum’s clothes, shoes and other household amenities mainly came from Delhi and Muradabad. Jewellers from Delhi used to come to Sahaspur to sell gold and diamond necklaces and earrings as well, she says.
Recalling her early childhood days, Arghwani Begum says she was overtly fond of climbing the trees. “I used to get together with my friends and climb the falsa and the morus trees and pluck the fruits.” She recalls having many dolls and playing with her friends. “Sometimes we would marry the dolls and enact a proper Indian wedding in their honour. Our mothers used to stitch the wedding clothes for the dolls,” she recalls. Most of Arghwani Begum’s childhood friends were daughters of farmers from all ethnic and religious backgrounds who used to visit her haveli with their parents quite often, especially during harvest seasons and crops distribution days. “Before I entered my teens, I was officially a boy with no purdah restrictions,” she says.
She learnt to read and write in Urdu at home. “We used wooden boards to write in Urdu. We’d use two types of bamboo pens, the ones with flat nibs was used for writing alphabets and the ones with narrow nibs were used for punctuation marks and dots,” she recounts. Arghwani Begum received her early and advanced religious schooling at home as well. She never went to an academic school of learning. “My father was against it. I grew up on Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s compilation of Islamic teachings in Urdu called the Bahishti Zewar and the novels of Maulana Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi,” she says.
In 1935, Arghwani Begum and her family went on their first annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on ship via Karachi. “I used to run around in the ship a lot. We were at sea for 10 days before reaching Mecca. We completed the pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina, and then went to Jeddah. We stayed there for about three months and returned to Karachi via Jeddah,” she says.
In 1943, she was married into a family from Delhi. “It was a three-month long wedding considering the time-consuming journeys on elephants. The barat stayed at our haveli for seven days,” she recalls.
By 1947, Arghwani Begum, mother of two children, a daughter and a son, was pregnant with her third child. Recalling events leading up to Partition, she said Hindu-Muslim communal tensions had begun to escalate after May 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed. “Before that, there was lot of unity and trust between the Hindus and Muslims. We began to see the effects of the resolution when fighting started to erupt in the villages of Sahaspur,” she says.
She was 25 years old and at Rang Mehal in Delhi when Partition was announced. She was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. “I really didn’t have any clear understanding of what is going on when our boxes were getting packed with valuables and necessities. My family told me that we are moving out of the haveli and nothing else,” she recalls.
They set out from Sahaspar in the family’s motor vehicles with her children, mother-in-law, husband, sister-in-law, uncles and their families for the Purana Qila (Old Fort) of Delhi. “At the Fort, we didn’t have a roof to sit under as there were so many families there and it was raining immensely. One of the families at the camp, in charge of pegging tents saw us and immediately pegged a tent around us. Arghwani Begum spent the night there and the next morning went into labour. She gave birth to her third child, a son, at the Old Fort migrant camp at Delhi, a day after Partition. Arghwani Begum’s sister-in-law had started crying incessantly after holding her new-born nephew “but I didn’t register why”, she recalls. “There were no clothes for the baby. He was draped in one of my daughter’s frocks,” she says.
They stayed at the Old Fort for two days and carried on to the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi in the army jeeps that were expected to pick them up. “At the station, while everyone was worried about having something to eat before the train departed, I wanted to get on the train immediately. I hadn’t eaten for nearly three days but had no hunger for food. I just wanted the journey to end,” she says.
During her journey to Lahore from Delhi that started on the 17th of August, her train made stops at various stations. Recalling a night’s stay at the Amroha Railway Stop, she says lots of people got off the train in desperation to get water and eatables for the journey but never returned. “At some stations that were downhill, we saw people from the hilly areas rushing towards our train with food and drinks for the refugees for the rest of the journey. It was a relief to see that but I still didn’t have the heart to eat or drink anything,” she says. As her train continued to move, Arghwani Begum witnessed the massacre of Sikh passengers in a train passing by theirs in the opposite direction. “There were men climbing and entering that train with swords and knives. I saw the sudden commotion and heard their screams and cries of panic. I also witnessed men jumping off that train with their women and girls. It was horrifying.” she recounts.
Her train finally made it to the Wagah border on the 20th of August but it was not the end of the ordeal as our train had come under attack too. “It was so sudden. We immediately sealed shut the windows of our train with whatever we could get our hands on. My baby almost fainted due to lack of Oxygen in our berth. One of the male helpers in the train helped my baby get some air through the train’s main entrance while the killing spree lasted for an uncertain period. There was a lot of people, especially children from many berths of that train had been killed. I saw their bloodied bodies when we finally got out of the train when the assailants had left,” she says.
From Wagah, Arghwani Begum and her family (mother-in-law, sister-in-law and children) moved to the refugee camp at Walton. They were picked up hours later and shifted to the Davis School which had been temporarily converted into a residence for migrants in poor physical shape. She was reunited with her husband and parents three days later. “They’d discovered our whereabouts through announcements on loud speakers at the railway station,” she recalls. From Davis School, Arghwani Begum’s family moved to her daughter’s future husband’s uncle’s house in Model Town where they stayed for two-three days.
From there, she moved to a small independent house in Model Town’s C-Block, once occupied by the Hindu families. “There was a 10-kanal vacant plot next to that house which used to belong to an affluent Hindu landlord. My husband purchased the plot and we had a big house built on it for my children,” she says.
In the 1950s, her family was allotted some lands at Dera Ismail Khan against their property at Sahashpur by the Pakistani government. “We had no roots or business in Dera Ismail Khan and therefore used those lands for agricultural purposes only,” she says. Her mother-in-law expired in 1971 followed by her husband who died of heart failure in 1975. The couple has two sons and four daughters. Two of her daughters are educated and settled in the US. “My husband had left my sons on a solid footing and taught them all there is to know about leading a responsible life. They practically took care of everything after his demise,” she says.
In 1980, she visited her birthplace in India with two of her daughters Nabahat and Sabahat on train. Her daughter says, “She had practically started shaking and crying as we approached her house. It was very intense for her,”
Arghwani Begum currently lives at her husband’s house with her maid, one of her sons, daughter-in-law, grand-children, and great-grand-children in Lahore nowadays.

Vilayat Khan was born in 1919 into a family of balladeers/folk musicians with musical prowess dating back at least two generations from his birth. His father’s name was Raj Mang and his grandfather, who was also a balladeer, was named Khairu; they were both dhaddis, practitioners of folk music rendered on a percussion instrument in Punjab. Vilayat is one of five siblings, all brothers. He did not attend a formal school and is not literate. He received training in folk singing, music and ballads from a very young age.
He was married to Dhanni before Partition. When Partition struck, Vilayat was living with his family in Goslan. Vilayat’s family initially came to Malerkotla where his maternal grandmother lived. Being a Muslim family in east Punjab, his family was forcefully sent to a refugee camp about a month after they came to Malerkotla. From that camp, they were boarded onto buses that took them to Kasur. From Kasur, they took a train to Lahore. They did not see any violence along the way. His family brought a lot of gold with them. Vilayat came to Pakistan with his wife Dhanni, four brothers, mother and father. All of Vilayat’s children, 4 sons and 3 daughters, were born in Pakistan.
Vilayat’s family eventually came to Sargodha, where it could only sustain itself with dignity till the time the money, gold and silver they brought with them was all spent. Vilayat says he forgot how to sing, including the poetry and lyrics of the songs he used to sing before Partition. There was no audience to appreciate his art. For survival, he did odd jobs like secretly cutting wood and selling it and other forms of day labor. He says such was his sadness in the 10 years that he lived in Pakistan, from 1947 to 1957, that he never once laughed.
Sometime in 1957, Vilayat and his father decided that they would return to Goslan, for that is where they believed they would be prosperous, both monetarily and spiritually, once again. Vilayat remembers selling his mother’s silver bangles and other ancestral jewelry to accumulate Rs. 9000, the amount of money he needed to make his journey from Sargodha to Goslan, a distance of over 400 kilometers with all sorts of bureaucracy and border controls that added to the challenge of returning to India. In the interview, Vilayat narrates in detail the obstacles he faced in his journey back to India, including how thieves posing as policemen robbed his family somewhere near Lahore. He crossed the border near Lahore as well. It took him three days to cover the distance between Sargodha and Goslan.
Vilayat says that his music “came back” to him after his return to India. Since then, Vilayat has continued singing and is one of the most senior and formidable exponents of dhaddi music across Punjab today. His contributions to his art form have been recognized by India’s national academy for music, dance and theatre, Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), in the form of the highly prestigious SNA Award in 2009. Today, at the age of 93, Vilayat lives with his children (some of whom have inherited his art form from him) and grandchildren in Goslan.